August Unemployment Data September 4, 2009

The unemployment rate went up to 9.7%, reversing the improvement we saw in July. To be fair, “unemployment” is somewhat difficult to measure. For one thing, the way the unemployment rate is calculated doesn’t take into account the people who are no longer looking for work. (You know, the “discouraged workers” we heard about endlessly during the Bush years.) So you could see the economy improve but the unemployment rate actually go up, because more people start looking for work.

So, you might ask: just how many jobs have we got out there? Why, looky here, the BLS tracks that as well!

The predicted numbers for May from a few days ago, with some thoughts on why unemployment is worse than expected even without the stimulus package (and a hearty discussion in the comments on proper graphing)

A look at the stimulus package spending – how late it is, and how little thus far has been devoted to job creation (it’s basically gone to pay off states’ social services debts)

The original post on the subject, noting that criticisms of the stimulus package may not have been motivated by racism after all.

Note: geoff didn’t write this post, but both charts and all previous posts are his work, and the person who updated the charts with the August numbers doesn’t want to take credit, so we put it under his byline. Direct any complaints to Site Administration.

Last month, when the number looked slightly better, the President lost no opportunity to crow about his success. This despite the fact that we were still losing jobs, so the drop in unemployment was really only an artifact of the way BLS treats the data.

Now that the number has gone up again, we can expect to hear that the Bush economy was worse than they thought, and that prosperity is just around the corner. Again.

Note to the administration: you can’t claim that you’ve solved the problem and then, when confronted by contrary data, claim that you didn’t understand the problem. At least you can’t do it without losing credibility and looking foolish.

My thanks to the person who posted this – I think they should have taken credit for putting it up this morning.

My retort: Obama took the Bush economy and made it staggeringly worse. Since the so-called “stimulus” (oh sorry, “stabilization”) act is pouring kerosene on a fire, how about let’s quit spending those funds?

Man, Chimpy McBusHitler sure did a whole lot more damage to the economy, the environment, foreign relations, racial relations, health care, and Democratic predictive analysis than we could have even imagined.

[…] Geoff has a nice chart that compares the Team Lightbringer fantasy with reality. Let me sum up the chart for you, the so called democrat “leadership” who came up with that Charlie Foxtrot are either incompetent or liars. Either one of those solutions is not very comforting to the American people. […]

I think geoff should legally change his name to Graphy McGraphalot. I read that in the comments last month (or was it the month before that…) and I still get a chuckle out of that when I see the update.

Regarding the arrows, it is a bit cluttered, but if y’all remember the big argument geoff had with people about exactly where each dot should be and when the quarters started and such, it’s probably easier to leave it this way.

Michael and I were sitting by the pool and a leaf started blowing along the pavement. His attention was on that little leaf like a beagle’s on a squirrel. The leaf blew closer to the pool, reached the edge and then backed off. Michael at this point was on point.

Then swoosh, there it went into the pool and there Michael went lunging for the skimmer.

I think that if there was an election coming up this November, this graph would be a real donkey-killer. Axlerod probably sees it in his nightmares, with a bar labeled “THis is how much You Suck” connecting the “without” line to the “actual” points.

Yeah, that happens with your comments sometimes. In fact, I remember pointing it out a few weeks ago. It’s odd.

I think this may happen because, as the Site Administrator, I can post a comment and then immediately edit it. Which I frequently do. It could be that WordPress stumbles when I do this at the same time that someone else is commenting.

Both parties own this recession and the fundamentally sick economy underneath it. We all thought it was a good idea to outsource our dirty manufacturing to growing third world contries and build our wealth with intellectually sophisticated money moving schemes and strategies. Now, when that doesn’t work, we have a very weak manufacturing sector to fall back on.

[…] my question is a very simple one; Barack Obama passed a $787 billion stimulus package that was supposed to halt unemployment at 8%, that number has virtually doubled, why is the MSM refusing to discuss […]

Could you post the raw numbers for this please or link to them. It looks as though most of the decrease in the number of jobs occurred (second chart) before the stimulus was passed. You can find a longer term chart in link below. The longer term chart would seem to imply, IMHO, that we have not been creating many jobs for a while now.

Although, I must say, Glenn was kinda slow about checking his email. I pimped this post to him early this morning, right after the faux-Geoff put it up. Glenn is behind the curve. Hot Air and AOSHQ had it first, and I pimped it to them at the same time. Plus, we’re getting lots of hits from American Thinker.

It’s like Glenn has a real job as a law professor and faculty member or something, and has to work for a living. So he is slow.

This article has published a graph depicting the number of jobs available and asked the question, “Doesn’t look so good, does it?” I wouldn’t know. That graph is a perfect example of what Darrel Huff called a “Gee Whiz graph” in his book _How To Lie with Statistics_. It prevaricates, that is it presents a very false picture without actually lying. It does this by chopping off the bottom portion of the data (# of available jobs from zero to 135,000). This makes the line *appear* to drop much faster and further than it actually does. Want to make it even more obvious? Chop the bottom off at 140,000 and the top at 145,500. Then the line would run from the very top of the graph and plunge all the way off the graph at the bottom, making it *appear* to represent a fall from the top all the way to below zero. That statisticulation is indistinguishable from a lie and I’m calling you on it. If you want to make a point, tell the unvarnished truth or we have every right to suspect everything else you write!

Michael, he’s talking about the second chart (incidentally, the y-axis was auto-generated by Excel, as would be obvious to anyone other than a mouth-breathing idiot). His point is that a decrease in “total employed” of 4.6% from January ’08 to August ’09 is, like, totally irrelevant, and that the chart totally doesn’t demonstrate a trend.

Seriously, dude, I get your point, and you’re right that graphs can be designed to be misleading. But this isn’t an example of that. The only point of that particular chart is to show a trend: a steady decrease in the number of total employed. People are being laid off and not finding new jobs, and people are retiring and not being replaced (quite a few of those at my own place of business; we’re losing a lot of our top talent to retirement, and we’re in a hiring freeze, so we don’t have many new people coming in). The result is that fewer people have jobs. It’s difficult to show that just by looking at the unemployment numbers, because those numbers don’t measure every single person who would like a job. All that statistic measures is the number of people who are actively looking for a job and don’t have one. So looking at the number of total employed provides some supplemental information to help understand the trends.

That statisticulation is indistinguishable from a lie and I’m calling you on it. If you want to make a point, tell the unvarnished truth or we have every right to suspect everything else you write!

I initially had the same objection to the way newspapers prepared their plots. 25 years ago. It’s commonplace now, however, so man up. If you don’t like it, plot it yourself. We’re looking for a trend here, and it’s easier to see the trend when the scale is large. Would you be able to tell if it was leveling off or continuing to decline if we used full scale? No.

Stop your whining and start plotting. If you’re more worried about the plot than the job situation it (accurately) depicts, then I don’t care if you believe what we write – you’re a fool regardless.

[and Michael is correct to note that the Obama administration did the exact same thing in the first chart to exaggerate the difference between the two approaches. Why are you a racist, Bill?]

Let’s assume that Mrs. Peel is correct and the actual decrease is 4.6% (I get a bit less, but that may be an error in eyeballing the chart). The line on the *second* chart decreases some 40%. Therefore the chart is making a 4.6% “trend” look like a 40% “trend”. If you don’t think that’s lying, you should get a job with the Administration. BTW, the first chart truncates, too, as Michael mentioned, but not by such an obvious amount.

The purpose of a graph is to visually depict a series of numbers, making them easier to understand, as humans are visually oriented. Making 4.6 look like 40 does NOT represent the actual numbers. Only fools would allow themselves to be manipulated in such an obvious way.

Thanks for the data source Mrs. Peel. Wanted to make sure I was using the same source. Looking at the raw data is interesting. The stimulus was passed Feb. 17. If we look then at total jobs from March to August (numbers are in thousands as specified in table) we go from 140,887 to 139,649, a loss of 1,240 or 0.88%. Looking at the same time period before the stimulus was passed (September to February), we go from 145,028 to 141,748, or 2.26%. There was a very big loss from February to March, but since the bill was passed in the middle of the month, I left that out. If you wish to go ahead and pro-rate it, it should skew the results making the 2.26% slightly larger since February is a short month.

These results would appear to show that total number of jobs is decreasing, but something is slowing down the loss. Feel free to check the numbers and/or comment on the methodology. Link to table I used from BLS follows. The numbers seemed to correlate with the data points on your graph.

You don’t work with numbers much, do you Bill. Nor, apparently do you read very carefully. Let’s try again, really slowly.

BTW, the first chart truncates, too, as Michael mentioned, but not by such an obvious amount.

The first chart was made by the Obama administration. Everything in blue was cut and pasted from their January report. It’s not even replotted – that’s the actual image of their graph. They chose the axes, not us. This is the 3rd time you’ve been told this. Pay attention.

Therefore the chart is making a 4.6% “trend” look like a 40% “trend”.

Sure, if you’re that inexperienced. As you can see from the 1st chart, the Obama administration expects that you’re a little more sophisticated than that.

But your criticism is only even relevant if you try to misuse the chart. The chart is showing employment levels: if plotted at full scale you wouldn’t be able to resolve those levels to better than a few million. It’s also allowing us to see if the slope of the data is changing – something a larger scale would never permit.

And is it changing? Not fast enough.

I get a bit less, but that may be an error in eyeballing the chart

First, go to bls.gov and look at the data yourself. Second, learn to read a chart. The change is 4.56%. When I eyeballed it I got 4.6%, so it’s not a problem with reading the plot. Now think about whether either of us could have come even close to the right value if the data was plotted at full scale.

Oh, and how does objecting to being lied to make anybody a racist?

As is well known, any criticism levied against the administration (such as your carping about the scale of their ordinate) means that you’re a racist. Wear your badge proudly.

These results would appear to show that total number of jobs is decreasing, but something is slowing down the loss

You are better off using the slopes, rather than comparing two months. As you can see, picking March, which was anomalously low, decreases your loss % for the March-August time span, and increases it for the preceding time span.

It’s also more accurate to break the data up into 4 periods: the flat region from Jan08 – Mar08, the relatively constant downward slope from Apr08 to Oct08, the precipitous decline from Nov08 to Mar09, and the relatively constant decline from Apr09 to Aug09.

If you do that, you’ll find that linear fits work well, and that the current decline is about 25% larger than the Apr08 to Oct08 decline, but 2.5X smaller than the Nov08 to Mar09 decline.

Side note: To keep the unemployment level constant, we need to add 127,000 jobs per month. Right now we’re losing around 260,000 per month.

[…] Unemployment. It was the first issue the liberal Democrats in DC claimed they had answers for, and they even mapped out their success in taming our beaten economy using government spending programs. To see why the Democrats are not credible takes only one simple, powerful picture: […]

Yes, I had noticed the four distinct parts to the data. I had thought you were looking at stimulus effects. Since it passed in Feb., would you not then start with March as that is the first month that could possibly be affected? I looked at the overall decrease over the March to August period to get the 0.88%. As an effort to avoid mistakes looking at charts, I try to go back and look at the actual numbers and calculate percentages, slopes in particular having fouled me up in the past.

I would think looking at the same amount of time immediately preceding the stimulus would be as good as you can get for comparisons if you are looking for the effect of the stimulus itself. As other variables change and employment is a lagging indicator, I am not sure how to factor this in or out TBH. All I can say is that the rate is decreasing compared with the immediately preceding time period.

Maybe the take home is that the Nov08 to March09 period was pretty awful and we are still not creating jobs.

Since it passed in Feb., would you not then start with March as that is the first month that could possibly be affected?

No one is really sure when it should start, since the spending started slowly and still has yet to reach a significant level. That was the original point of this graph – that the timelines that Romer et al. were projecting were ridiculously optimistic. There’s almost no point in continuing to even show their projections, since both the w/ and w/o stimulus curves are obviously completely irrelevant to our situation.

But as I said above, March in particular is clearly anomalously low, so basing percentages on March gives very bad answers. And I don’t know how slopes would ever be rejected in favor of percentages of particular data points – that leaves you completely at the mercy of data scatter. No statistical analysis would ever prefer that approach. And the problem is obvious with your result, where scatter has introduced a strong bias into your conclusion.

[…] month has gone by, so it’s time to check up on how the “stimulus” bill is doing. Innocent Bystanders has updated its invaluable chart, which shows the actual unemployment rate compared with the rates […]

[…] month has gone by, so it’s time to check up on how the ’stimulus’ bill is doing. Innocent Bystanders has updated its invaluable chart, which shows the actual unemployment rate compared with the rates […]

@# 107, Geoff,
Forget the first chart! I don’t care about the first chart! The first chart has nothing to do with my point: that the *second* chart lies like a rug. It would go so if the first chart was perfect, which it isn’t, and I’m not claiming it is. The *second* chart would lie even if the Washington administration published it. I don’t care who cut and pasted either one: the *second* chart lies all the same. You pay attention. Stop trying to throw a red herring into the discussion.

The fact that you wouldn’t be able to see the change if the *second* chart was honest IS THE WHOLE POINT! The amount of the decrease is that small, numerically. The only honest reason for drawing that picture is to make a 5% change look like a 5% change. If you think that change is significant, and I do, it’s awful, then discuss the significance, don’t “cut-off and paste” to improve your argument. The eye sees that picture and says “Wow! Huge drop”. No, it isn’t, and, apparently, it takes an experienced chart reader to understand this and why it is important: trends are about both direction AND magnitude. If a 5% downward trend isn’t impressive enough, you can’t doctor it to look like 60%. If you don’t think the honest picture is impressive enough, don’t publish it, describe it in words.

Where in the article were the actual numbers mentioned? I missed that. Why should I have to surf the web to find information that has no real bearing on my argument: that truncating a graph is dishonest, no matter who does it or for what reason.

Did I say that the 4.6% was wrong? No, I just carped that looking at a chart on a computer screen and trying to judge the actual numbers is difficult. Another red herring.

If complaining about the honesty of information found on the web makes one a racist, then I WILL wear the label proudly. Can I get a button? Or am I completely missing the satire here? BTW, insulting the messenger instead of dealing with the message usually means the writer has no argument against the message.

I thought that only radicals imputed false opinions to people who disagreed with them, are you one? I have said nothing whatsoever about what I think about the stimulus, Obama, or anything else except about the proper use of statistics. For the record, I think that the current government (Congress since the Democrats took over during the Bush administration, and the current situation in Washington) is nothing short of a disaster. That doesn’t mean that I support lying about it. By either camp!

@ #109 You’re right, it is 60%, I forgot to subtract from 1. That makes the lie that much worse!

The fact that you wouldn’t be able to see the change if the *second* chart was honest IS THE WHOLE POINT! The amount of the decrease is that small, numerically. The only honest reason for drawing that picture is to make a 5% change look like a 5% change. If you think that change is significant, and I do, it’s awful, then discuss the significance, don’t “cut-off and paste” to improve your argument.

See, Bill, that’s the whole point. 5% is not a big number, if you’re just doing math. It’s a huge number in real life. It radically affects consumer confidence.

Every single person that visits this blog knows about friends and family that are going through the trauma of unemployment. This affects their behavior in the market.

The solution to this was simple and proven — tax cuts. Especially tax cuts on capital investment.

Obama did the exactly wrong thing — jack up debt in order to throw money at his pals in the SEIU and grow the overhead of the government bureaucracy that drags down job creation. Scare the capital markets with more massive incompetent government intervention in the banking, auto, energy, and health care sectors.

The first chart has nothing to do with my point: that the *second* chart lies like a rug.

Except that the first chart does exactly the same thing. As you yourself said. And frankly, it’s more deceptive than the first chart.

The only honest reason for drawing that picture is to make a 5% change look like a 5% change.

That’s incorrect, as explained several times. Look at it this way: we’re plotting job loss, not employment. We’re really interested in the rate at which jobs are disappearing or reappearing. That’s why it’s plotted that way. Rather than just plotting cumulative jobs lost, however, we put it in terms of employment so that you can see what the actual employment numbers are. That gives more information than just jobs lost.

Why should I have to surf the web to find information that has no real bearing on my argument: that truncating a graph is dishonest,

Because generally on the Internet, if you find a post you don’t like, you go and make your own instead of whining and trying to make somebody fix theirs to suit you.

And as I said before, truncating graphs is standard practice. Standard. Practice. It’s not controversial – it’s done all the time (as in the 1st graph), and is considered necessary when details of the region you’re interested in would be obscured at full scale. As in this case.

Seriously, have you ever plotted anything professionally in your life? Or at least in graduate school?

insulting the messenger instead of dealing with the message usually means the writer has no argument against the message.

…or it means that the messenger walked in and started calling me a liar, when he obviously has no clue as to what he’s talking about. That will always earn you a heated response.

You’re right, it is 60%, I forgot to subtract from 1. That makes the lie that much worse!

I just knew that you’d say that. But in hopes that you’d be a little smarter than that, I left the opening for you. Oh well.

Believe me, if I wanted to lie with statistics, you’d have no idea that I did it.

I agree with you completely. It is because I feel that exposing Obama’s lies to the American people is so critically important, that I become furious when his critics waste their opportunity by using the same statistical shenanigans as Obama’s people, but in the opposite direction. Do you not see what a tremendous opportunity this gives Obama’s supporters? Look what Geoff did (#109): He caught me in an inexcusable arithmetical error, gave the correct figure and then implied that because he demonstrated he could do arithmetic better than I, therefore my incompetence means that everything I said can be safely ignored. This gave him the excuse to do just that, he completely ignored the fact that his correct figure strengthened my case immensely! Read “lie” for “error”.

Think what could happen if a critic pulled out that second graph and used it to try to demonstrate how bad things are in some debate: The Obama supporter could just pull out the proper graph, note how insignificant the data really *look* and then dismiss the critic for the exaggeration. End of discussion in this sound-bite era. It would have been MUCH better if the author had published the real graph and then provided arguments why the numbers are significant no matter how insignificant they may look. Prepare us with arguments we can actually use. Otherwise many people will ignore all the arguments as universal untruths and vote for the prettiest face.

No, Bill, your simple math error, combined with your lack of experience with plotting and failure to address even one of the arguments supporting the presentation of the data, led to the conclusion that everything you said can be safely ignored.

You’ve simply repeated yourself over and over. Since I can now predict with 100% accuracy every one of your future comments, I’m going to leave you to continue to bleat away.

[…] month has gone by, so it’s time to check up on how the “stimulus” bill is doing. Innocent Bystanders has updated its invaluable chart, which shows the actual unemployment rate compared with the rates […]

Seriously, look: yes, the chart is truncated. This is STANDARD PRACTICE, as geoff has pointed out several times. How standard is it? It’s so standard that EXCEL DOES IT AUTOMATICALLY, which is clearly where the axis came from in this case. This chart is not some sinister plot*. No one in his right mind would look at that chart and go “Oh hai 60% of jobs in America are gone!!!” The point is to show the TREND in the data, which is that the number of total employed is decreasing. That is the ONLY purpose of that chart.

@# Geoff,
I mentioned the first graph in my post #104 because Michael in #97, as corrected by Ms. Peel in #98, seemed to think my original post referred to that one. It didn’t.

I have produced many graphs professionally, and I can tell you if I tried to truncate one my statistics professor would have flunked me, with good reason. Has the world changed so much in 40 years?

It is also “standard practice” in the motel industry to advertise one price and charge a higher one if you don’t get it in writing before trying to check in. It is also “standard practice” in the computer industry to advertise backup tape capacity as twice the actual capacity. That doesn’t make it right. The fact that it is “standard practice” to present misleading graphics is what makes it so easy for misinformation to be propagated.

I didn’t call you a liar, I just said the graph lied. Obviously, I haven’t convinced you of that yet, so there is no intent on your part. Can I have a Miller Lite, instead? It’s brewed in my home town and I want to preserve my neighbor’s job.

Let me try one more time to explain. Imagine that I am trying to sell you some shares of stock, instead of an idea. I have 1,000 shares of Acme-Coyote, Inc. I tell you that it was first offered for sale on September 1, 2008. I can’t lie about that or I risk going to jail. It is not “standard practice” to lie about dates. I also tell you that the trend, the trend, mind you, of the stock’s price has been ever upward since then. It is also not “standard practice” to lie about that, either, so you can assume that the stock’s price has increased every month since 9/1/08. Are you willing to buy? Probably not, so let me produce a graph for you. It IS standard practice to finagle with a graph. Stock brokers do nothing but. The graph’s y-axis is labeled “Price” and has 12 even tick marks up the side. The x-axis is labeled 9/1/08 to 9/1/09. The line goes up at a 45-degree angle from the first tick at 9/1/08 to the 12th tick at 9/1/09. Think good and hard at the picture that graph presents.

However, being experienced in these things you go to the web, visit acmecoyoteinc.com and find out what I am not telling you: The stock was initially offered for $100.00 a share. On 9/1/09 it was selling for $100.12, having gained a penny each month. Aren’t you excited? What I did was to present you with a graph that plotted price from $100 on 9/1/08 to $100.12 on 9/1/09 and chopped off the bottom at $99.99. Standard practice – it represents the trend, doesn’t it? It also depicts the *rate* of increase. I don’t know, given the market’s performance lately maybe that is still a good buy. However, it is for you, the buyer, to make that decision, not me the seller. My job is to present you with all the data you need to make your decision. Please tell me how you can justify my presenting you with that graph. It makes 12 cents *look* like a really big deal, both in amount and in rate of increase, and no amount of special pleading can change that fact. It misrepresents BOTH trend and rate. I most emphatically did NOT give you all the facts you needed, you had to go to the web. Truth, nothing but, just not all of it. I object to this Standard. Practice.

That’s all true, Michael. But mech infantry is primarily designed to operate in open terrain, as part of a combined arms team with Armor and Artillery. In fact, a large part of what Brads were designed to do was suppress antitank fires against M1s.

Light infantry is designed to operate in close terrain, such as jungles or mountain terrain (like, say, Afghanistan) that are difficult for armored vehicles to operate in. Light infantry traditionally has no organic transport.

They (usually) operate in different areas and under subtly different doctrines. For instance, a light infantry unit in a desert is very vulnerable to being overrun by mechanized forces.

However, mechanized units are vulnerable to ambush by light infantry in close terrain, such as mountain passes (see the Soviets in Afghanistan).

[…] news is, this baseline is accurate; you have their word on that. It’s not like the last one – the one that showed unemployment never touching 8 percent as long as we passed the ’stimulus.’ Even the White House will admit that one was wrong. But even though the CEA was comically […]

[…] is, this baseline is accurate; you have their word on that. It’s not like the last one – the one that showed unemployment never touching 8 percent as long as we passed the ’stimulus.’ Even the White House will admit that one was wrong. But even though the CEA was comically wrong […]

[…] this baseline is accurate; you have their word on that. It’s not like the last one – the one that showed unemployment never touching 8 percent as long as we passed the ’stimulus.’ Even the White House will admit that one was wrong. But even though the CEA was comically […]

[…] So let’s check up on these two things. Below is a chart (reproduced from Greg Mankiw’s blog) showing what the administration forecasts were for the unemployment rate, with and without the stimulus package: (Original image source here.) […]

[…] bill as a failure. It is a failure. And that means the Democrats and President Obama are failures. This graph shows the damning truth of it all – the red is the result, the dark blue on the bottom was […]

Hi… I got your ‘address’ from a friend of yours… PattyAnn… she commented on this blog I have on blogspot… told me you have a flag counter and you don’t have the Surinamese flag yet… so here I am… hope my flag shows up.

The stimulus didn’t work. I am one of those people not included in the unemployment numbers. I can’t see small business saving us this time, as you would have to be nuts to start a business with the liabilities and regulation these days.

[…] So let’s check up on these two things. Below is a chart (reproduced from Greg Mankiw’s blog) showing what the administration forecasts were for the unemployment rate, with and without the stimulus package: (Original image source here.) […]

[…] So let’s check up on these two things. Below is a chart (reproduced from Greg Mankiw’s blog) showing what the administration forecasts were for the unemployment rate, with and without the stimulus package: (Original image source here.) […]